On April 24, 2024, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. On April 23, at a regular press conference held by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, a reporter asked that on the eve of Blinken's visit to China, the United States was drafting a draft to completely drive Chinese financial institutions out of the U.S.-led global financial system and punish China's trade with Russia. The United States believes that it is precisely because China trades with Russia through its own financial institutions and enterprises that it "supports" Russia's special military operation in Ukraine. In the face of such speculation from the United States, the Chinese Foreign Ministry of course gave a stern refutation, but Blinken's visit to China has absolutely bad intentions, and the outside world is also speculating whether the financial war between China and the United States has reached the time of a showdown.
First of all, based on the current situation, it can be judged that the news that "the United States is initiating sanctions against Chinese financial institutions" must be true. Since the beginning of this year, the United States has imposed sanctions on Sino-Russian trade-related enterprises, and has also launched secondary sanctions and deterrence against Chinese financial institutions such as Bank of China, China Commercial Bank, China Construction Bank, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. The United States has threatened that as long as the relevant banks continue to undertake remittance business for trade between Russia and China, and as long as these banks remain within the global financial market and within the scope of US supervision, the United States will certainly list these banks as targets for sanctions and crackdowns. At that time, the market reaction was that China's four major commercial banks suspended their financial operations against Russia, which shows that the United States said that it would impose secondary sanctions on Chinese financial institutions. As exposed by the U.S. media, the U.S. is in full swing drafting relevant sanctions bills, which China must be vigilant against, and in this sense, Blinken's visit to China is definitely a time for a showdown in the financial war between China and the United States.
Second, since there have been clues before, and the United States has openly threatened to impose sanctions on China's financial institutions, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry made it very clear yesterday, it is also necessary to analyze the reasons why the United States insists on doing so. Everyone knows very well that finance is the blood of the modern economy, and if Chinese financial institutions are directly excluded from the global financial system dominated by the United States, it will inevitably have a huge impact on China's overseas interests and will also greatly damage China's global trade. After all, it is clear to everyone that China's development today benefits from global development, and global development benefits from close ties with China, in which finance plays a bridging role, and the reason why the United States must do so at the risk of a rupture in relations with China is because it is a strategy to kill three birds with one stone.
First, the United States can directly hit Russia through such technical sanctions. There are many reasons why Russia has been able to stand up in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine so far, and one of the most important reasons is that the United States has never put Russia in a desperate situation. Originally, the United States wanted to trap Russia in the encirclement through global sanctions, but it did not expect that there was still a very large gap in this encirclement, and this gap became Russia's life, and this lifegate was held by China, India and other countries. If the United States can impose strong sanctions on Chinese financial institutions this time, it can weaken China's economic and trade relations with Russia to a considerable extent, and then bleed Russia, which is one of the reasons why Blinken and the United States have done so at the risk of offending China.
Second, this move by the United States can hit and weaken China. After all, China has always been the greatest threat to the United States in asserting its hegemony, and it has always been regarded by the United States as its strongest and most powerful competitor. Nowadays, the United States wants to impose sanctions on China in all aspects, which is nothing more than an attempt to disrupt or delay the pace of China's rise, and at the level of international competition, finance is the soft underbelly of China's all-round game with the United States, after all, China's time to globalization is relatively short, and there are indeed some serious problems in the financial field. In terms of personnel training, application of teaching materials system, and financial thinking, basically all accept Western ideas, and the West has been infiltrating China's financial field for a long time. Now, the United States is impatiently launching sanctions against Chinese financial institutions and removing them from the US-led global financial system, which is nothing more than an attempt to take advantage of China's unstable foothold and vigorously carry out anti-corruption in the financial sector to launch a fatal blow against China, so as to disrupt the pace of China's rise.
Third, the reason why the United States wants to impose sanctions on Chinese financial institutions is to vigorously maintain its global financial hegemony. The reason why US hegemony has been able to survive to this day is that although military hegemony and scientific and technological hegemony are very important hard powers, financial hegemony should never be underestimated. After entering the 21st century, the financial hegemony of the United States was impacted by the euro and the yuan, and in 2008, a real estate crisis detonated the global financial crisis, which directly took the euro down. Nowadays, the US strategy of containing China has become the US national policy, and under such circumstances, the United States naturally wants to use every opportunity to vigorously suppress the renminbi, and the more the renminbi is internationalized, the more it is the biggest threat to the hegemony of the dollar. Therefore, through Blinken's visit to China, the United States has also issued an ultimatum to China, and the ultimate goal that Blinken wants to achieve is to maintain the global financial hegemony of the United States, and if China does not make concessions, the United States will definitely not give up.
Finally, the United States wants to completely decouple and break the chain with China in the financial sector, and China also has many strategies to deal with it.
First, as the saying goes, Blinken will go to China in a vigorous manner, to exercise the "long-arm jurisdiction law" against China, and to be a teacher to China, and China will certainly not let Blinken go wild on his own turf. In this case, of course, Blinken is asking for a sky-high price, and China is sitting on the ground to pay back, and this is mainly reflected in the direct meeting of relevant departments.
Second, China should pursue an unswerving fundamental strategy, which is to strengthen China's awareness of financial security risks and strengthen its own financial capabilities. The so-called strong financial capability is to have its own strong central bank, financial norms, and financial team, and more importantly, to build a financial knowledge system with Chinese characteristics based on China's own development. If the American-style financial knowledge system is not completely eliminated ideologically and intellectually, the talents cultivated by China will serve as an internal response to the United States.
All in all, although Blinken's visit to China is only a working visit, the decoupling and breaking chain against China contained in the actions of the United States behind the scenes is real, and China must be vigilant about this.